Thank you, George

You are right Mr President 8212; India matters. And this is also true of food demand. Being a product of the oldest university...

You are right Mr President 8212; India matters. And this is also true of food demand. Being a product of the oldest university of the home of the brave and the land of the free, I am taking the liberty of sending a larger brief on India8217;s food demand than Ms Rice sent you. The brief is free because average Americans have always been free and friendly with me.

India8217;s food demand mattered even when it was a colony. In my book, Indian Development Planning and Policy, I pointed out that at the beginning of the 20th century, India8217;s grain consumption per person was 200.2 kg and went down every five years till it reached the miserable figure of 152.2 kg when the British quit India in 1947. A British econometrician friend of mine, Angus Deaton, convinced me over bajri bhakri and kadi shak in Ahmedabad where I live, that grain consumption is the most important indicator of human welfare in a poor society and so this epoch created perhaps the most severe episode of large-scale human misery, including famines.

You are right Mr President 8212; it is a good thing that food consumption is going up in India. That colonial episode hammered this point home, which is why some of us get upset when others give erstwhile imperialists the certificate of 8220;good governance8221; 8212; a view that should be appreciated by the people of the country which fought the American War of Independence. The famine episode mattered because our leaders were moulded by it.

I was, given my Penn degree and the fact that my professor was the author of the Wharton Econometric Model and an early recipient of the Nobel in econometrics, asked to make the first serious plan of self-reliance in food. In those days, American think-tanks, the Hudson Institute, the Paddock brothers and others called us a basket case, which would never feed itself, and one of your distinguished predecessors from Texas, gave us a lot of food aid for which we are always grateful, but tended to side with our detractors. In 1974, when we said that we would be self-reliant by 1978, they all made fun of us.

But India matters, as you have said. And by 1978, Mr President, we exceeded our grain target and never looked back. Even our finance ministry had not believed us in 1974, but India could do it. In Washington, I was asked how we exceeded our grain target by 2 million tonnes to which I had said, 8220;I come from Ahmedabad, we are a trading people and we build in reserves in our policies.8221;

By 1990, our food basket was diversifying. Grain consumption growth was slowing down and non-grain food picking up, fats, sugar, fruits and vegetables growing at twice the grain rate and milk, fish and eggs even faster. In a neat table, I showed how this was happening as our economy was growing faster in the Rajiv Gandhi period and my senior, Vijai Vyas, did it more elegantly. India mattered then too, but until the CIA and Goldman Sachs picked it up in 2003, they didn8217;t tell your predecessors.

We are sorry Mr President, but unlike you they did not know that India matters. One cannot blame them because some favoured economists of Indian origin working in America still find it difficult to recognise all this and for them, even in books written in 2007, the food and energy self-reliance episodes of India are best ignored since they were a part of the dark ages.

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Meanwhile, I must report another episode. An American think-tank wrote a paper and gave it to our prime minister in 1974 which said that India would never feed itself in the long run for as income rises, people eat more meat and meat needs more land. Indira and Rajiv Gandhi took the future seriously and so this was sent to me for comment. We worked very hard on it since this was a very serious argument from our technologically sound American friends. But it turns out that given our arable surface area, water resources and the technologies already adopted by our farmers, even with a steady state population of 1.4 billion, if the rich Indians of that time ate meat like the rich Indians of today, we would have enough grain to feed ourselves.

Occasionally, we bungle but we are a very fractious society, and our bunglers also have to correct themselves. In the long run we are not a problem. If you don8217;t believe me, ask McDonald8217;s. In Ahmedabad instead of the McBurger, they sell McAloo burgers with potatoes from Mehsana. That is comforting because if the rich Indians of that time ate like the rich Americans of today the world would collapse. However that will not happen and we will trade with you buy some and sell some and our scientists will also spare a little land for jatropha. We also showed the world that when small things happen to a lot of people, the effects can be more than a lot happening to a few people and we call this inclusive growth.

This also proves that while nothing is ever easy, in quantities of change, India matters. Thank you, Mr President 8212; and, incidentally, I support the nuclear deal in public in India and am close to losing my trade union card as a radical Indian economist.

The writer is a former Union minister for power, planning and science, and was vice-chancellor of JNU

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